LATEST ARTICLES

Namita Bhandare

Namita Bhandare

But at the heart of the Hadiya controversy lies not so much the right of a grown woman to choose her husband and religion, but prevailing attitudes towards women by society at large. Seventy years after Independence and despite a Constitution that guarantees us equality and dignity, we are simply not to be trusted when it comes to decisions about personal life choices, particularly if those choices don’t meet with social approval. Well into a new century, women are still viewed as the property of their fathers and, then, husbands. It is not good news and certainly not worth celebrating....

John McCain and Angelina Jolie

We’ve seen this unfold in Syria, where the United States and the international community have shamefully failed to address brutal violence that has engulfed the country for seven years, led to hundreds of thousands dead and contributed to the worst refugee crisis since the end of World War II. And sadly, we are seeing now this same lack of effective diplomacy in Myanmar, formerly Burma, where since last summer 680,000 Rohingya Muslims have been forced to flee a systematic military campaign of killings, arson, rape and other mass atrocities amounting to ethnic cleansing....

Ayla Jean Yackley

Ayla Jean Yackley

The UN Development Program ranks Turkey 69th in its Gender Inequality Index and 71st in its Gender Development Index out of 188 nations. Other measurements give Turkey even poorer marks. Turkey has sunk to 131st place out of 144 countries on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index for 2017....

Amin Valliani

Amin Valliani

Though the relationship among family members can come under stress due to modern lifestyles, with love and affection one can make the family a fortress. The art of compromise and give and take is an essential component of life. In case of rigidity and inflexibility, the family breaks up. This creates a terrible situation for all the members of family but the children suffer the most....

Shahzaib Khan

In a conflict as protracted as Afghanistan, a singularly fragile ray of hope for peace can stir up global interest. Ghani’s offer has done that. With the Americans having already recognised the impossibility of a military solution to the Afghan war, the Trump administration’s bellicose “new” approach of taking the fight to the Taliban, is in fact an attempt to fight the Taliban to the negotiating table....

Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk

Which is why Theresa is doing something faintly familiar when she courts the kings and princes and emirs of the Gulf? In order to get their money, she is appeasing them. Yes, appeasement is her policy with wealthy Arabs, in the most literal sense of the word. She is satiating their appetite for war against the Shia. She is turning her back on the Yemen war, a quarrel in a far away country – you might say – between people of whom we know nothing....

Sarwat Faiz Ahmad

Sarwat Faiz Ahmad

Islam encourages education for both men and women. Had it not been so, the 14th century society of Arab region would not have produced enlightened thinkers and scholars. However in course of time, true Islamic education had been vague in Saudi Arabia. But thanks to the education, once again Saudi Arabia is going to provide its men and women with equal rights in various social fields, marking a major step away from the strict guardianship system that has ruled the country for decades. In other words, it is going to be the biggest cultural shake-up in the modern history of Saudi Arabia with regard to Saudi women’s empowerment. ....

BEST OF BEFORE ARTICLES

Naseer Ahmed, New Age Islam

Naseer Ahmed, New Age Islam

Without
religion, there wouldn’t have been a civilization let alone the excellence man
has achieved in the sciences and man would have been just another animal living
the life it lived as a primitive. This fact however gets obscured because of
the visible presence of the naïve fundamentalists who oppose reason and
science. The atheists see religion with disdain as some appendage from the
past, unable to acknowledge its contribution and relevance. Such intellectuals
deserve being called ingrate rebels against God more than any other group of
people, for they can surely ascertain the truth of a revealed Book such as the
Quran. On the question of evolutionary biology, there is no need to doubt
either Science or the Scriptures. The question is not as it is unfortunately
posed “do you believe in evolutionary biology or do you believe in
religion?....

Muhammad Yunus, New Age Islam

Muhammad Yunus, New Age Islam

Scholars are
free to hold any view but if they take to lies or half-truths to support their
views, they do far greater harm to their community than any good. They become
conspirators and traitors. And as for
any Muslim scholar who dreams of editing the Qur’an or dismissing it
altogether, he must learn lesson from history. The Moghul Emperor Akbar the
Great who styled himself a reformer of Islām - arriving almost 1,000 years
after the Prophet Muḥammad, introduced a modified version of
Islam, Din e Ilahi. He couldn’t make even a score of converts in his
long life. Where do people like the present day proponents of a modified Qur’an
stand...

Raheel Raza

Raheel Raza

Before World
War II, Nazism was an ideology expressed in “Mein Kampf.” Before 2 million
Chinese died in the Cultural Revolution, ideas were written down in a “Little
Red Book.” And in 1928 another ideology appeared, with the founding of the
Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks a totalitarian system of government and forced
implementation of Shariah law. This ideology fuels ISIS and al-Qaida,
subjugates women, executes homosexuals, kills Christians and inspires some
“home-grown” American Muslims to commit acts of terror....

Hilal Ahmed

Hilal Ahmed

Evocation of
Islamic homogeneity was also beneficial for Nasreen. Despite her support to the
BJP-led central government on issues such as ‘triple Talaq’ or her active
participation in anti-Muslim controversies such as use of loudspeakers in
mosques, she has not been able to achieve the status that Canadian journalist
Tarek Fateh has acquired in a short span of time. Hindutva forces do not find
her suitable enough for representing anti-Islamic views in the name of
reforms....

Dr. Adis Duderija, New Age Islam

Dr. Adis Duderija

By definition
the subscription to progressive Muslim thought also implies that the sacred
scriptures cannot offer us humans an unequivocal, clearly accessible and once
and for all valid understanding of God through the simple process of
reading/interpretation. Instead, progressive Muslims’ consider the human
interpreter and her subjectivities and contingencies as most significantly
determinative of the process of interpretation envisaged as a never ending
dynamic process that continually evolves with reason....

Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, New Age Islam

Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, New Age Islam

To put it simply, Historicism in Islamic studies
connotes an intellectual approach for the contextualisation of the Qur’anic
texts in order to produce accurate explanations. In other words, it implies
that what happened in the past, should be discussed and elucidated in terms of
when it happened. Even the early Islamic historians like Ibn Khaldun employed
this scientific methodology and remarkably advanced it in his seminal work
“Muqaddama”. He referred numerous Islamic traditions back to the pre-Islamic customs
of what is known as “al-Arab al-Jahili” (Arab in the era of ignorance)……

Moin Qazi, New Age Islam

Moin Qazi, New Age Islam

In today's
increasingly global world, the stakes are higher than ever—for everyone.
Societies that limit women's educational and employment opportunities and their
political voice get stuck in a downward spiral. They are poorer, more fragile,
have higher levels of corruption, and are more prone to extremism. To those
opposed to reformist ideals, let us remind them of Iqbal’s assertion: “[t]he
teaching of the Qur’an that life is a process of progressive creation
necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its
predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems.”...

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan for New Age Islam

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan for New Age Islam

This principle
is taught in Islam, too. It was exemplified in the life of the Prophet
Muhammad. For instance, in the case of the Hudaibiya Treaty, the Prophet agreed
to the conditions set by his opponents, and in this way secured peace. The
Quran refers this treaty as Itmam-e Naymat (48:2). This means that the
treaty signed at Hudaibiya was a sign of completion of God’s favour to the
Prophet. Why does God call the treaty Itmam-e Naymat? This is
because now that peace had been established because of the treaty, it provided
the opportunity to do other, constructive things, using peaceful methods....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

However, the reason that Hassan Radwan
gives for historicizing the Quran is simplistic and problematic. Firstly, it is
not true that one cannot beat the traditionalists in the game of selective
quotation from Quranic passages supporting moderate and liberal voices.
Scholars, both modern (like Amina Wadud) and traditional (like Fazlur Rahman)
have shown how a different hermeneutical reading of the Quran is possible: one
that is consistent with a modern and liberal worldview. It is true that in most
of the Muslim countries, such interpretations have either remained marginal or
have altogether failed....

Robert Carle

Sufi orders
formed in the ninth and tenth centuries as spiritual movements to bypass the
legalism of the Ulema and the worldliness and luxury of the caliphate. At a
time when Islam was becoming dogmatic, claiming that Muhammad’s religion was
the only true faith and that the Qur’an was the only valid scripture, Sufis saw
God everywhere, even in pagan traditions. At a time when the Ulema had closed
the gates of Ijtihad, regarding revelation as complete, Sufis sought new
revelations from God. At a time when the Ulema preached a God of law, Sufis
spoke of God as love....

Javed Anand

Javed Anand

But now enters
a British Muslim, Hassan Radwan. In an article recently published by the online
portal New Age Islam, he makes an altogether radical prescription for
salvaging Islam from “the hard-line literalists undermining the soul of a
loving, universal creed”. According to him, “Liberal and progressive
interpretations depend mostly on nuanced readings of the Quran and Sunna, or
forcing new meanings out of them. But by playing the extremists’ game of
interpreting the texts, we allow them a semblance of legitimacy. We also give
them the opportunity to come back with theological workarounds”. So, what is to
be done? Radwan’s answer: “We Muslims need to take the bold step of challenging
the very idea that the Quran and Sunna are infallible.” But how can the Quran, the word of God,
be fallible? Simple. “The Quran is not the speech of God”, he maintains,
quoting several modern-day Muslim scholars as also quite a few from the early
period of Islam in support. According to Radwan, once Muslims accept that the
Quran is not the Word of God, they can “unashamedly cherry-pick” from among the
Quranic verses, accepting the good ones and rejecting the bad. Like the
Christian reformists did 500 years ago?...

Ghulam Ghaus Siddiqi, New Age Islam

Ghulam Ghaus Siddiqi, New Age Islam

The
fact that the biggest terrorists since the advent of Islam were the Kharijites,
who used Islamic titles, appearances and mercilessly killed the rightly guided
caliphs and Muslims, is also that ISIS as neo-Kharijites have adopted the same
tactics to kill the modern-day Muslims and non-Muslims living under the
peace-pact environment. These neo-Kharijites have shattered the true image of
Islam, committed heinous crimes and distorted the historical fact of the
rightly guided caliphate. In their mouthpiece “Rumiyah” magazine, they
repeatedly misinterpret the war-related verses for terrorist propaganda and
recruitment; it is, therefore, our responsibility as Muslims to correctly
interpret those verses in a bid to thwart their ambitions....

Akbar Ahmed

Akbar Ahmed

When looking at
Muslims, Westerners completely miss a significant part of the community, the
converts. In order to better understand the diversity and complexity of Islam
in the West today, we will hear in this series over the next few weeks the
voices of Western Muslim converts. They are natives of England, Denmark, and
Germany and they too represent Islam. They include a Cambridge scholar, an
imam, a music director and a television presenter and author. In short as
diverse a group as one can expect...

Roshan Shah, New Age Islam

No culture has
been—or can be—immune to change, no matter what self-styled purists may demand
or expect. Change is a hallmark of human life, personal as well as
collective. Even if some people would
like to preserve cultures intact, as in a museum, this can never happen.
Internal developments as well as the impact of external events ensure that
cultures are always in a process of flux....

Muhammad Yunus, New Age Islam

Muhammad Yunus, New Age Islam

There is of course another way to look
at the spending trend of this era. The people, who pay heavy taxes and are
engaged in a time demanding and stressful job, need change and recreation to
regain their energy with recreation, entertainment and travel – none forbidden
in Islam. The Qur’an only forbids an obsessive craving to spending money with
complete disregard of one’s social responsibilities. Such people, the Qur’an
says, have no faith in God or the hereafter and are dominated by the Satan….